Cash-flow statements generated by online accounting services typically report on the historical cash-flow transactions of a business entity. Consequently, the statements are of limited value in answering pressing questions faced by small businesses in survival mode such as: “How much cash will I have on hand two weeks from now?” “Can I meet payroll?”, “How much money is it safe to spend?”, or “Will I hit a cash crunch in the next month?”.
Some accounting services do attempt to forecast future cash flows. However, the services tend to require users to manually project various incomes and expenses or to define a mathematical form they expect each income or expense to follow. Both approaches are burdensome to the user, expecting them to basically already know the trajectory of their business. Consequently, automated machine- and data-driven cash-flow forecasting remains an area of ongoing research and experimentation.